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The question arises what phase of the Soul enters into the
union for the period of embodiment and what phase remains
distinct, what is separable and what necessarily interlinked, and
in general what the Living-Being is.
On all this there has been a conflict of teaching: the matter
must be examined later on from quite other considerations than
occupy us here. For the present let us explain in what sense we
have described the All as the expressed idea of the Governing
Soul.
One theory might be that the Soul creates the particular entities
in succession- man followed by horse and other animals domestic
or wild: fire and earth, though, first of all- that it watches
these creations acting upon each other whether to help or to
harm, observes, and no more, the tangled web formed of all these
strands, and their unfailing sequences; and that it makes no
concern of the result beyond securing the reproduction of the
primal living-beings, leaving them for the rest to act upon each
other according to their definite natures.
Another view makes the soul answerable for all that thus comes
about, since its first creations have set up the entire
enchainment.
No doubt the Reason-Principle [conveyed by the Soul] covers all
the action and experience of this realm: nothing happens, even
here, by any form of haphazard; all follows a necessary order.
Is everything, then, to be attributed to the act of the
Reason-Principles?
To their existence, no doubt, but not to their effective action;
they exist and they know; or better, the Soul, which contains the
engendering Reason-Principle, knows the results of all it has
brought to pass. For whensoever similar factors meet and act in
relation to each other, similar consequences must inevitably
ensue: the Soul adopting or foreplanning the given conditions
accomplishes the due outcome and links all into a total.
All, then, is antecedent and resultant, each sequent becoming in
turn an antecedent once it has taken its place among things. And
perhaps this is a cause of progressive deterioration: men, for
instance, are not as they were of old; by dint of interval and of
the inevitable law, the Reason-Principles have ceded something to
the characteristics of the Matter.
But:
The Soul watches the ceaselessly changing universe and follows
all the fate of all its works: this is its life, and it knows no
respite from this care, but is ever labouring to bring about
perfection, planning to lead all to an unending state of
excellence- like a farmer, first sowing and planting and then
constantly setting to rights where rainstorms and long frosts and
high gales have played havoc.
If such a conception of Soul be rejected as untenable, we are
obliged to think that the Reason-Principles themselves foreknew
or even contained the ruin and all the consequences of flaw.
But then we would be imputing the creation of evil to the
Reason-Principles, though the arts and their guiding principle do
not include blundering, do not cover the inartistic, the
destruction of the work of art.
And here it will be objected that in All there is nothing
contrary to nature, nothing evil.
Still, by the side of the better there exists also what is less
good.
Well, perhaps even the less good has its contributory value in
the All. Perhaps there is no need that everything be good.
Contraries may co-operate; and without opposites there could be
no ordered Universe: all living beings of the partial realm
include contraries. The better elements are compelled into
existence and moulded to their function by the Reason-Principle
directly; the less good are potentially present in the
Reason-Principles, actually present in the phenomena themselves;
the Soul's power had reached its limit, and failed to bring the
Reason-Principles into complete actuality since, amid the clash
of these antecedent Principles, Matter had already from its own
stock produced the less good.
Yet, with all this, Matter is continuously overruled towards the
better; so that out of the total of things- modified by Soul on
the one hand and by Matter on the other hand, and on neither hand
as sound as in the Reason-Principles- there is, in the end, a
Unity.
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